Pipo Saude, a Brazilian provider of healthcare services for businesses and their employees, has raised $4.6 million in a new round of funding to expand its footprint in Brazil.

“The company’s platform offers recommendations for the healthcare products that fit the team, enabling businesses to improve the quality of life of their employees,” said chief executive and co-founder, Manoela Ribas Mitchell. “We go all the way to the end beneficiaries.”

Pipo Saude helps companies price their insurance appropriately and bring down the medical loss ratio that companies suffer. Medical inflation in Brazil may be worse than in the U.S., with prices rising at around 20% per year.

Like the U.S., people in Brazil often default to hospitals and urgent care facilities when they’re sick or injured; that “urgent care culture,” as Mitchell calls it, drives up the cost for providers and employers. “We try to move the needle toward preventive care and specialist doctors,” Mitchell said.

Backing the company with a $4.6 million round are two of Latin America’s top investment firms — Monashees and Kaszek Ventures . OneVC, the San Francisco-based investment firm that also invests in Latin American tech companies, also participated in the round.

Pipo Saude makes money off of commissions and has a few corollaries in companies like Zenefits (in its earliest days), Amino or the Canadian care benefit management company, Mitchell said.

The company currently has about 30 employees on staff, and some of the new cash will be used to scale the business.

For co-founders Mitchell, Vinicius Correa and Thiago Torres, the healthcare market was an obvious choice when they looked to start their own company. Torres and Mitchell had known each other as students at the University of São Paulo, where they both studied economics. Mitchell and Torres both pursued careers in private equity, where Mitchell worked at Temasek and then at Actis, focusing on healthcare, while Torres also went to Agavia Investimentos.

Correa worked in startups, initially as an employee at Nubank, where he met Mitchell through a mutual friend.

While healthcare may be a tough knot to unravel — especially for a startup — the size of the Brazilian market alone is enormous. “We’re talking about a $50 billion revenue pool,” says Mitchell. “If we want to build a very robust product we have to focus on Brazil for quite a while.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Pipo Saude raises .6 million to bring healthcare benefits management services to Brazil

The unicorns are still at it, Vision Fund 2 or no Vision Fund 2.

This week, Instacart announced that it has raised fresh capital at a valuation north of $13 billion. And, on the tail of that news item, DoorDash is looking to add more cash at a valuation that could stretch to a pre-money valuation that exceeds $15 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Both announcements make it plain that late-stage unicorns are still able to attract huge sums despite a putatively uncertain, if recently excitable IPO market.

It’s an interesting state of affairs, as the prices that super-late-stage unicorns are able to charge private investors push their valuations so high that only the largest and richest companies might be able to afford buying them. The result could be a closed M&A window that leaves only an exit hatch marked “IPO.”

Amazon, for example, paid around $13.7 billion for Whole Foods, a chain of U.S. grocery stores that the technology giant also uses as distribution points for parcel delivery. Instacart, the grocery delivery service, is now worth $13.7 billion as well.

As the private company’s final investors won’t want to merely break even on their investment, Instacart

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Why are unicorns pushing back IPOs when the Nasdaq is near record highs?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

After a pretty busy week on the show we’re here with our regular Friday episode, which means lots of venture rounds and new venture capital funds to dig into. Thankfully we had our full contingent on hand: Danny “Well, you see” Crichton, Natasha “Talk to me post-pandemic” Mascarenhas, Alex “Very shouty” Wilhelm and, behind the scenes, Chris “The Dad” Gates.

Make sure to check out our IPO-focused Equity Shot from earlier this week if you haven’t yet, and let’s get into today’s topics:

• Instacart raises $225 million. This round, not unexpected, values the on-demand grocery delivery startup at $13.7 billion — a huge sum, and one that should make it harder for the well-known company to sell itself to anyone but the public markets. Regardless, COVID-19 gave this company a huge updraft, and it capitalized on it.
• Pando raises $8.5 million. We often cover rounds on Equity that are a little obvious. SaaS, that sort of thing. Pando is not that. Instead, it’s a company that wants to let small groups of individual pool their upside and allow for more equal outcomes in an economy that rewards outsized success.
• Ethena raises $2 million. Anti-harassment software is about as much fun as the dentist today, but perhaps that doesn’t have to be the case. Natasha talked us through the company, and its pricing. I’m pretty bullish on Ethena, frankly. Homebrew, Village Global and GSV took part in the financing event.
• Vendr raises $4 million. Vendr wants to help companies cut their SaaS bills, through its own SaaS-esque product. I tried to explain this, but may have butchered it a bit. It’s cool, I promise.
• Facebook is getting into the CVC game. This should not be a surprise, but we were also not sure who was going to want Facebook money.
• And, finally, Collab Capital is raising a $50 million fund to invest in Black founders. Per our reporting, the company is on track to close on $10 million in August. How fast the fund can close its full target is something we’re going to keep an eye on, considering it might get a lot harder a lot sooner. 

And that is that; thanks for lending us your ears.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Take Facebook money and get cloned